There is no message for them to get. Even if the Democrats did a 180 on gun control, they’ll never win those votes back. The gun nuts will remain convinced that the Democrats are out to get their guns.
Well, for the original retained rights like conscience, speech, assembly and the right to arms (not an exhaustive list) the provisions recognizing and securing them are redundant because they don’t “do” anything but forbid the federal government to exercise powers it was never granted.
Those rights don’t exist nor are they secured just because they are enumerated in the Bill of Rights, those rights exist because no power was ever granted to government to interfere with those rights.
I read the link and I’m not seeing the support for the claims you are making. Can you quote them from the article? From what I see, there is vague reference (as you do here) but no actual evidence.
The only thing that is a fraud is citing Burger as an authority on the 2nd Amendment. While on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Warren Burger never wrote a word about the Second Amendment. After he left the Court he became a paid puppet for Handgun Control Inc. (what the Brady Campaign used to be called).
In your post you are conflating two separate statements by Burger made a year apart. The infamous “fraud” quote is the later one, spoken during a televised interview in 1991 on PBS’s “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour”.
You employ an ellipsis in your post but I gotta ask, are you using it to denote traveling back in time because the Parade Magazine statement that ‘continues’ your ‘quote’ was made in 1990.
I have to laugh because you expose Burger’s schizophrenic constitutional understanding without noticing he’s pretty much preaching the NRA gospel . . . Didn’t you read what you quoted?
You quote Burger saying that there is an unquestioned right for Americans to defend their homes with firearms; that such a right, “need not be challenged”. He continues that, “the Constitution protects the right of hunters to own and keep sporting guns for hunting game,” in the same fashion that no one could, “challenge the right to own and keep fishing rods and other equipment for fishing . . . .”
He tells us what types of guns are protected by the Constitution; “To ‘keep and bear arms’ for hunting today is essentially a recreational activity and not an imperative of survival, as it was 200 years ago; ‘Saturday night specials’ and machine guns are not recreational weapons and surely are as much in need of regulation as motor vehicles.”
So, Burger does admit that the express constitutional mention of [the right of the people to] “keep and bear arms” guarantees private citizens (not connected to any militia nor acting under militia orders) a constitutional right to own guns for home defense and a right to own hunting guns.
OK
In your quote, Burger goes further and recognizes three exemplary rights – hunting, fishing, and buying cars – that are so firmly guaranteed by the Constitution that they are beyond question while knowing that no Supreme Court case has ever held any of these activities to be Constitutionally protected.
So, what can we draw from Wandering Warren’s analysis?
Machine guns (and presumably cheap?? handguns) should be regulated in a fashion like motor vehicles but guns suitable for defense of the home and guns suitable for hunting should be as immune from governmental oversight as fishing equipment since the right to own such things is unquestionable and not subject to challenge (including it seems, any “militia only” based attack on the right).
Sounds like in 1990 he’s advocating the NRA’s position that a unassailable constitutional right to own guns for various legal purposes without any militia conditioning exists . . .
And then, less than a year later when he’s getting paid by Handgun Control Inc., such a position is a “fraud”???
But that suggestion runs afoul of foundational principles and settled rules of constitutional interpretation and going on 141 years of boringly consistent Supreme Court opinion on the right to arms / 2nd Amendment.
I agree that textual / linguistic arguments about what the 2nd Amendment says, fail in instructing us what the right is. The thing is, the right in no manner depends on the words of the 2nd for its existence so its pointless to “interpret” words that do not create, grant or establish the right and have no conditioning action on the right.
The right doesn’t exist because of what the 2nd Amendment says; it exists because of what the body of the Constitution doesn’t say.
Would altering Newton’s Law change gravity?
The only people who waste breath talking about “absolute” rights are those who want to give government absolute power.
And the same types of “restrictions” have always existed for the right to arms. The illegitimate actions of murder, assault with a deadly weapon, brandishing have always been considered breaches of the peace just like libel, inciting to riot, slander etc. The restrictions you advocate for gun possession and use has no equal in speech except for restrictions considered facially unconstitutional (i.e., prior restraint).
False. The right to arms is not what can be squeezed (interpreted) from the words of the 2ndA. The right is the silence of the body of the Constitution granting any power allowing the federal government to dictate to the private citizen in any manner as to his personal arms. See, the most powerful weapon of the day was in private hands during the Revolution (Man o’ War). In the Constitution the power to create, maintain and deploy these ships was granted to Congress (cl. 11, granting Congress the power to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal”). I believe the principle underlying that grant of power can be applied to restricting civilian ownership of indiscriminate weapons of war such as NBC.
I argue that between clause 11 and 12 (raise and support Armies) there is field preemption enjoyed by the federal government (over the states and the citizenry) regarding the weapons of indiscriminate warfare.
Again, the only people prattling about “absolute rights” and “expansive views” that demand parity of arms for civilians to include fighter jets and nukes, are those arguing against any reading of the 2ndA that protects the possession and use of small arms by private citizens.
The US Constitution is a charter of conferred powers and all not conferred [surrendered] is retained . . . The people can not claim as a right an interest that they have surrendered (e.g., printing currency is not a right). The flip side of that coin is that everything held out from the Constitution, that we have retained, can not be claimed as a power by government.
What is so hard to understand about that?
Why do you need to make it so difficult on yourself?
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Your examples consist of the privileged elite and the “Fudds”, neither of which are particularly comforting to people who want to own guns for deterrence and self-defense.
A choice the Democrats have forced upon them; because unlike almost all other issues facing them, the right to own and carry guns is one whose extinction would be irrevocable.
Except that, for example, Trump’s position on gin control is about the same as Hilary’s.
Abatis, are you actually seriously arguing that the ‘constitutional’ right to bear arms was given, not by the Constitution, but by God?
It’s always been the opinion of constitutional scholars that the Constitution and its amendments secure recognition of, but do not create, fundamental rights. Any other construction would send us straight back to Hobbes- no one having any rights other than what Leviathan deigns to grant.
LOL. Except that Hillary promised if elected to appoint SCOTUS justices that would overturn Heller and Trump promised to appoint justices in the mold of Scalia, the author of Heller.
It does not matter where you assign the origin of our fundamental rights just as long as you do not point to the legislative acts of man.
Really, where do “retained” rights come from? (See 9th Amendment)
SCOTUS has consistently held that the constitution did not grant the right to arms. Its provenance is not necessary to determine other than to know that it is not from the constitution, rather it is a preexisting right.
I’d like to think she mixes a better Martini.
Heh. 
Seeing that Trump is a Teetotaler you are probably right.
Well, I’ve never read Hobbes, but I know a little Rousseau. He would say that we enter into a social contract by giving up rights, but by so doing we secure other, hopefully greater, rights. The rights (and opportunities) we give up we do actually give up, though. It sounds to me like some of you are demonizing a democratic state for doing the very thing such a state is designed to do: deciding which rights an individual keeps and which he does not.
Are we really to call Australia and the UK “Leviathan,” as if each of these parliamentary democracies were an obscenity, or some kind of embodiment of Envy (?!), just because they tweaked the social contract in this way?
Well, while denying it a couple posts above you seem to acknowledge here that rights are possessed by the people before they decide to enter into the social contract establishing government. As the Declaration states, government is instituted to secure [already existing] rights.
Greater than the original unalienable, (incapable of being surrendered) rights of life, liberty and property (happiness)? Sure, some rights are created by the compact (like trial by jury, warrants for search or arrest, protection from cruel and unusual punishment) but they are procedural to protect the citizen from the direct action of the government the compact creates. I would not recognize them as being “greater”, than the original, fundamental rights like speech, assembly, and the right to arms.
Which I certainly recognized (and accept):
Please quote the statement where this occurs. The denial and misrepresentation (which amounts to demonization) of what the Constitution does (and does not) comes more from the left and that always begins with the rejection of the principle of inherent, pre-existing rights HELD OUT OF THE POWERS GRANTED TO GOVERNMENT – substituting a doctrine where rights are subject to the whims of the majority of the sovereign “democratic state”.
When the subject is rights? Yes.
As Madison recognized (page 2), the English Declaration of Rights was a “mere act of Parliament” and as such could be modified or even rescinded without any appeal to or input from the people – those rights only exist for as long (and to the degree) the government allows.
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But why is the right to bear arms so important to retain, and the right to print one’s own currency not important to retain?
The right to keep and bear arms is important because it preserves the foundational principle of a sovereign people who consent to be governed. It preserves the original right of self-defense, political and personal.
The USA, unlike any other nation, is established upon certain principles that are permanent and unchangeable (without dissolving the current social contract and establishing a new one).
They are:
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The federal government was established by the people conferring specific, limited powers through the Constitution that allow the federal government to perform specific, limited duties.
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The federal government only exercises those express, limited powers with the consent of the governed.
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If the federal government violates the principles of its establishment and/or exceeds the powers granted to it, it has lost the legitimacy to govern. It is no longer “the government established by the Constitution”, it is something else.
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That government, untethered to the Constitution, is then subject to the citizen’s original right to rescind their consent to be governed and retake the powers originally surrendered.
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That rescinding renders the federal government powerless and unable to claim the protections of the Constitution, prosecuting sedition and treason and supremacy and preemptive powers.
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If that rescinding of the authority to govern and de-powering of government can’t be done peacefully, then the people must resort to the means of their personal arms, the right to keep and bear them having been completely held out from the powers granted to government.
When it is reduced to that final, most fundamental inalienable principle, that is why the 2nd Amendment exists, to preserve the original right of political self-defense, the irrevocable, inviolate right of the people to rescind their consent to be governed.
And that is why allowing the federal government to condition or qualify the right, or to maintain a registration of guns or owners, or exercise arbitrary prohibitory powers over the arms of the citizen, is facially illegitimate.
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I agree with these principles you’ve listed, but I deny that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to support them. The purpose of the Second Amendment is that the populace as a whole must be armed in order to protect the country, so that a standing army is not needed. Any other utility of an armed populace is a side effect.
Now the realities of modern warfare greatly favor centralized command and control, but the defense of the country should be entirely within civilian means. That is, you can’t let any random citizen maintain a SAM site. But there should be civilian SAM sites, maintained by local governments and working cooperatively with the state and feds. And so on, for all armaments needed for defense, down to individuals keeping arms within the context of their municipality. The federal military should exist only to coordinate the civilian defense structures and project force outside the country.
Of course, we’ve strayed far from that path and it’s too late to demilitarize the bulk of our armed forces. Fortunately our military seems loyal to the civilian rule, but it’s easy to find countries where the goals of the military diverge from the wishes of the general populace.
As an aside, one of the most illiberal concepts that’s become common is the idea that rights are granted by the government. Rights are an inherent part of being sapient individuals, who form governments to protect those rights. Just because one’s rights are not protected, does not mean one does not have those rights.
Well, the Constitution does not really contemplate its own rescision by force if necessary; that is a concept from the Declaration of Independence, as a “natural” right of peoples. But that did a fat lot of good to the legitimately elected representatives of the peoples of South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Lousisana, Tennesee, North Carolina and most of Virginia…
Actually my reading of the 2nd is that whe they say the armed citizenry is “necessary for the security of a free state”, that includes themselves providing protection for their families and communities when the formal authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. Nothing so exhalted as overthrow of tyranny. And that would be good enough for me. It provides for the freedom to keep and bear arms suited for self-defense and quite frankly I’m more along the lines of focusing on mental health than focusing on hardware.
But going back to the OP – I don’t believe the debate over open carry itself would be quite mappable to anything in that original debate about the armed citizenry. The way I see it for most of history sure you’d have weapons at home, or at the shop. Sure if you’re out in the woods or on the range you’ll be armed. And you may be packing under your jacket or belt if you feel the need. But why make a display of it? For most of the people of America along its history (remember most of your ancestors arrived here well after the founding and a majority probably even after the closing of the frontier) it would just have struck them as odd that someone would want or need to walk around city streets visibly armed just for the sake of showing it. Some gun rights advocates, meanwhile, claim that conspicuous displays of open carry are a way to normalize the presence of weaponry, so more squickable people should/will get over it. Alas sometimes the easily squicked person is themselves armed or is a LEO and unpleasantness ensues (but that’s another thread).
As far as I am concerned I have no issue with someone with a handgun secured in a belt holster at the mall. I will however chose to find someone walking down that same aisle with a rifle slung tactical-style as if at the ready to be odd.